Evidence of a Defective Education System

 There could be few greater indictments of an educational system than that it produced a general ignorance of Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage. Ricardo's law was first propounded in 1817, so that's been 208 years now that educators have had to disseminate the news.

I think the law was most succinctly expressed as follows:

"If A is in such a way more efficient than B that he needs for the production of 1 unit of the commodity p 3 hours compared with B's 5, and for the production of 1 unit of q 2 hours compared with B's 4, then both will gain if A confines himself to producing q and leaves B to produce p. If each of them gives 60 hours to producing p and 60 hours to producing q, the result of A's labor is 20p + 30q; of B's, 12p + 15q; and for both together, 32p + 45q. If, however, A confines himself to producing q alone, he produces 60q in 120 hours, while B, if he confines himself to producing p, produces in the same time 24 p. The result of their activities is then 24p +60q, which, as p has for A a substitution ratio of 3/2q and for B one of 5/4q, signifies a larger output than 32p + 45q. Therefore it is manifest that the division of labor brings advantages to all who take part in it." (Mises, Human Action, p. 191)

Logical implications of the Law are as follows;

- Tariffs undo the division of labor, i.e. make everyone poorer. Poor people will be more severely affected than rich people.

- A nation can make its citizens richer by unilaterally abolishing its own tariffs. If any interference in exchange makes us all poorer, then any liberalization of trade makes us all richer.

- To the extent that a state levies tariffs on imports, it limits the ability of its citizens to export to the citizens of the state on which the tariffs are levied. That is because trade is reciprocal: if one trading partner reduces its imports, the other trading partner must reduce its imports as well. Conclusion: levying tariffs on imports hurts one's own exports.

What Propertarianism Says About the Morality of Abortion

Propertarianism is a political philosophy, generally traced back to Locke and the Levellers, whose basic tenets have been systematically supported in the writings of Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and others. Propertarian analysis produces such statements as “Justice is served when no non-consensual appropriations of property rights or titles occurs,” “One owns one's own body,” and "Retribution and restitution for non-consensual appropriations of property rights (torts) should be proportional."

The most significant attempt to apply propertarianism to the problem of the morality of abortion was Walter Block's Evictionism. Block boiled the problem down to the two propositions below:

1. Life begins at conception, and a fetus is fully-endowed with the rights of self-ownership, including the right not to have one's life non-consensually terminated.

2. A woman is an absolute self-owner and doesn't have to allow her body to be used for pregnancy against her will.

Block argues that in spite of #1 above, the fetus is a trespasser on the woman's property and that abortion of an unwanted fetus would be act of self-defense. According to propertarian theory, violent coercion is permissible in defense of self or property or in legal proceedings based on just legal principles. However, if abortion entails the killing of the fetus, that's a problem for Block (because of #1). Although a woman may evict a fetus from her womb, the doctor performing the abortion is obligated to try to save the fetus' life if technologically feasible.

Wisniewski opined the harm of evicting the fetus from the mother's womb is disproportionately greater that the harm done in requiring the non-consenting mother to carry the fetus to full term (or at least to the point where it can be removed without killing it). So Evictionism is charged with violating the rule of proportionality. 

Justice theory (i.e. political philosophy) is built on the premise that the individuals subject to its analysis are discrete human beings. A woman and her fetus do not fit the criterion of being discrete human beings. Therefore, I conclude that, when it comes to the morality of abortion, political philosophy is the wrong tool for the job. The moral rules that apply to the morality of abortion could be the rules that govern one's personal behavior, but not the rules that concern interaction.

Although Evictionism went very far in the application of propertarianism to the moral problem of abortion, it could not overcome the basic unsuitability of any kind of political philosophy for the task.

References

Wisniewski, “Rejoinder to Block's Defense of Evictionism,” Libertarian Papers, Vol. 2, No. 37 (2010).

"Pinal communities set to lose millions as rental taxes banned"

 I recently saw this item in the news that Google thinks I should know about.

 The purpose of this article seems to be to set forth the arguments against recent legislation that banned rental taxes in the state of Arizona. The main concern seems to be that municipalities will lose income:

“As with all General Fund revenues, this money is then used to fund core town services such as Police and Fire protection,” the statement read. “(W)e will continue to evaluate this cut and any other reductions to local revenues to determine the impact on town services and how best to allocate these resources once this law becomes effective in 2025.”

 In other words, if municipalities lose money, services that taxpayers value most, such as fire and police protection, might not be able to be provided!

  Furthermore, the ostensible motive for eliminating rental taxes is to give renters, who may be young and poor, a break. But it turns out that this motive may be wrong-headed:

"But she [Governor Hobbs] said there is no “enforceable mechanism’’ to ensure that landlords, who remit the tax to cities and towns, actually would pass along the savings to their tenants."

No "enforceable mechanism." Doesn't that mean that cheaper rents is just pie-in-the-sky?

Hobbs may have gone through the education system and graduated with a Master's in Social Work without ever having been exposed to the concept of market forces. They function as an organic outcome of the aggregate of everyone's consensual agreements to exchange property. So they don't have to be "enforced," like legislation.

What this means in terms of rentals is that a landlord seeking to reduce vacancies has more incentive to lower price. This may not be enough "ensurance" for politicians and voters, but legislation that raises costs definitely affects ROI, which is a big factor in whether or not something gets built. But I guess a lot of people in Arizona don't actually want anything to get built? 

"And Senate Majority Leader Mitzi Epstein, D-Tempe, said there was a more practical problem. She said even if landlords no longer charge the tax, they will simply raise their rates knowing that’s what tenants are willing to pay."

 Landlords do indeed want to charge all that the market will bear. But the downside of raising rents is vacancy. Successful landlords fear empty properties as much as they lust after higher rents. It's a judgement call, and landlords who judge correctly do well. Landlords who charge more than the market will bear don't do so well. Market discipline, it's also called. The larger and more un-hampered the market, the stronger the discipline.

 

"Supply Shock" vs. "Monetary Loosening"

       In 2021, inflation (understood to mean a rise in prices) began to rise sharply. One explanation of this phenomenon is that supply shocks (decrease in supply of goods) were responsible. That makes sense---less supply = higher price on a supply-demand graph. The other explanation was that the addition of new money (increase in supply of money) led to the inflation. That also makes sense. So is there any way of knowing which explanation is correct?

     Well, of course, both explanations could be correct. Both supply shock and monetary loosening could have been at work simultaneously to create the humongous inflation of recent years. However, I think the following can also be said: if supply shock were the only factor, one would expect that prices would return to pre-shock values. Granting that some degree of supply shock probably occurred, if prices don't return to pre-shock levels, then that is attributable to increase in the supply of money.

          Right?

Social Justice

What does "social justice" mean?

At first glance, it appears to  be a redundancy. Without a "society" (even consisting of only two people), the problem of "justice" simply doesn't arise. Isn't "social" the adjectival form of "society?"

Apparently not. Here's a definition of social justice pulled from the internet:

Social justice is justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society. In Western and Asian cultures, the concept of social justice has often referred to the process of ensuring that individuals fulfill their societal roles and receive their due from society. In the current movements for social justice, the emphasis has been on the breaking of barriers for social mobility, the creation of safety nets, and economic justice. Social justice assigns rights and duties in the institutions of society, which enables people to receive the basic benefits and burdens of cooperation. The relevant institutions often include taxation, social insurance, public health, public school, public services, labor law and regulation of markets, to ensure distribution of wealth, and equal opportunity.

First off, I notice that social justice entails distribution of property. "Distribution" seems to imply some super-social agency (group of people) who are empowered to determine who gets what. This would be in contrast to the organic results of the free market based on a propertarian justice system. 

How is social justice to be achieved? The methods listed are as follows:

1. Social insurance---the forcible inclusion of people in a social insurance scheme that entails taxation (i.e. the appropriation of property).

2. Public health---the forcible maintenance via taxation (i.e. the appropriation of property) of certain people as determiners of what scientific theories are to be considered "true" with the eventual goal of forcing people to obey their prescriptions.

3. Taxation---the levelling of incomes to produce more equality (accomplished by appropriation of property).

4. Public school---forced attendance at state schools maintained by taxation (i.e. appropriation of property).

5. Public services---forced use of public services paid for by taxation (i. e. appropriation of property).

6. Labor Law---forced adherence to legislated or administratively determined rules related to exchanges of property (i.e. goods and labor).

7. Regulation of Markets---forced adherence to legislated or administratively determined rules related to exchanges of property (i.e. goods and labor).

What is the key concept behind social justice? It seems to be that property rights will be abrogated. But this is the opposite of the meaning of justice!

Social justice = injustice.

How to Conduct Arguments Online (or in Any Other Medium/Situation)

1. Be Precise

Excessive and obscure verbiage leads to confusion.

2. Avoid Arguing Over the Meanings of Words

Not having the same definition of a key word in an argument leads to "arguing past each other"---each side is arguing a different topic. Many words have more than one meaning. Be sure you're not arguing past each other by a) defining words at the beginning of the argument, and b) stopping the argument as soon as misunderstanding due to different definitions of key concepts is detected.

Be open to the possibility that you can argue better by accepting an opponent's definition of a word (but if opponent is merely trying to define a concept out of existence, further argument may be futile).

Changing the definition of key terminology in the middle of an argument is an informal fallacy known as "equivocation."

3. Talk about Ideas, Not People

Arguments on the topic of political philosophy may devolve into arguments about politicians. An argument about a politician is a historical analysis. In order to argue about a historical analysis in a convincing way, the arguer will need to know a lot of facts to the point of being a specialist on the topic, as opposed to an argument about political philosophy where you only need to know the rules of logic.

4. Don’t Just Avoid Strawmanning

The straw man—where you erect and destroy an inaccurate caricature of your opponent's position—is one of the most common fallacies in online debates. 

You can't win an argument simply by demolishing your opponent's strawman versions of your argument. You have to set forth a persuasive argument, or you can't expect an opponent to be persuaded. 

5. Actively Steel-Man Your Opponent

As a corollary of "Follow the argument"(Plato, The Republic, 394d “…wherever the argument, like a wind, tends, there we must go”)---the idea that argumentation is above all a search for truth, you should proactively steel-man your opponent’s position, to help make their argument as strong as possible. Only by arguing against as strong an argument as possible can you be confident that you're getting at the truth.

6. Don’t Argue with Trolls

Not all who pose as arguers have the search for truth as their goal.

 A troll seeks, by various techniques, to manipulate an authentic arguer into degrading his logical argument to the level of an angry diatribe. When this happens, the troll has "won" (accomplished his goal for pretending to engage in argumentation).

Don't engage as there is nothing of value to get from that conversation, and it will only be a waste of your time.

7. Keep an Open Mind

As Hans-Hermann Hoppe has said, participation in an argument implies that the arguers can be convinced of the truth of an argument's conclusion by the logical validity and soundness of the argument. This is summed up in the motto "Follow the argument." In other words, when one participates in an argument, there must be the possibility not just of persuading others, but also of being persuaded oneself.

8. Know the Rules of Logic

Since the time of the Ancient Greeks, the methodology of argumentation has been logic.

(This post inspired by a post from Patrick Carroll, writing for FEE 9/23/22)

Is-ought and Its Relation to Hoppe's Argumentation Ethics

 Is-ought and Its Relation to Hoppe's Argumentation Ethics

Richard Opheim

Abstract 

     Hoppe's Argumentation Ethics (AE) purports to show that propositions related to justice can be logically justified. Previously, it had been more or less decided that Hume's Law prevented any apodictic conclusions in the realm of morals/ethics. How then, does Hoppe think that AE could make an apodictic contribution?

Intro

     As the purpose of all moral investigation (including justice) is to prescribe how humans should or ought to act, moral statements are sometimes called ought-statements. Depending on your preferred analysis of the language, an ought-statement is an imperative or implied conditional statement that tells its listener what he or she should do in order to conform to a moral rule. An is-statement, on the other hand, can be a fact or other kind of demonstrably-true statement.

Hume

     Hume held that philosophers who seek to use logic to prove the truth of moral statements are committing a logical fallacy:

“In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.”1

     So, Hume's Law states that one may not deduce a normative conclusion from non-normative premises.

Poincaré

     Then is it impossible to use an ought-statement in a syllogism?

“If both of the premises of a syllogism are statements with the verb in the indicative, the conclusion will also be a statement with a verb in the indicative. In order to obtain a conclusion with a verb in the imperative, it is necessary that at least one of the premises has a verb in the imperative.”2

     It's possible to deduce an ought-conclusion, as long as one of the premises is an ought-statement. However, there are no self-evidently true ought-statements, and so an ought-statement conclusion will never be apodictic.

Hoppe

     Hoppe's justice theory argument 3  (called AE for “Argumentation Ethics.”)  is as follows:

1. The answer to the question of what constitutes apodictically true rules of justice must be arrived at via the means of argumentation.

2. The act of argumentation presupposes that arguers have access to scarce resources. This has implications first of all for self-ownership: “… no one could possibly propose anything, and no one could become convinced of any proposition by argumentative means, if a person's right to make exclusive use of his physical body were not already presupposed.”

3. Argumentation also implies the right to claim unused scarce resources via first use (homesteading), since lack of the latter would make argumentation impossible. “By virtue of the fact of being alive, property rights to other things must be presupposed to be valid. No one who is alive could argue otherwise.”

4. “…[I]f a person did not acquire the right of exclusive control over … goods by homesteading, by establishing some objective link between a particular person and a particular resource before anyone else had done so, but instead late-comers were assumed to have ownership claims to things, then literally no one would be allowed to do anything with anything unless he had the prior consent of all late-comers.”

     As Hoppe's AE argument contained no ought-sentences, he claimed to have avoided the is-ought problem.4

     None of Hoppe's critics explicitly criticized AE for attempting to turn an is into an ought. 

Summary of Hoppe's AE and Is-Ought

     Hoppe had this to say about is- and ought-statements:

“Ought-statements cannot be derived from is-statements. They belong to different logical realms. It is also clear, however, that one cannot even state that there are facts and values if no propositional exchanges exist and that this practice of propositional exchanges in turn presupposes the acceptance of the private property ethic as valid. In other words, cognition and truth-seeking as such have a normative foundation, and the normative foundation on which cognition and truth rest is the recognition of private property rights.”5 

    Since the propositions of AE are is-statements, Hume's Law was not violated. Does this mean that Hoppe's AE has transcended the is-ought gap?“6  As Hoppe himself remarked:

“There is and remains a difference between establishing a truth claim and instilling a desire to act upon the truth—with ‘ought’ or without it. It is great, for sure, if a proof can instill this desire. But even if it does not, this can hardly be held against it.”7 

Notes

1.  David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 295.

2.  Henri Poincaré, Dernières Pensées, 225. “Si les prémisses d'un syllogisme sont toutes les deux à l'indicatif, la conclusion sera également à l'indicatif. Pour que la conclusion pût être mise à l'imperatif, il faudrait que l'une des prémisses au moins fût elle-mème à l'impératif.”

3. First appeared in “The Ultimate Justification of the Private Property Ethic,” Liberty (September, 1988), but was subsequently elaborated in A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, 1988.

4. Hoppe's AE was partially inspired by Habermas's Discourse Ethics which was already seen as a demonstration of an apodictic ought-argument that didn't trigger Hume's Law.

5. Hoppe, op.cit, 345.

6. "[H]e has managed to transcend the famous is/ought, fact/value dichotomy that has plagued philosophy since the days of the scholastics.” M. Rothbard, Liberty, November, 1988.

7. Hoppe, op. cit., 408.

References 

[1] Hoppe, H.H., “The Ultimate Justification of the Private Property Ethic,” Liberty (September, 1988).

[2] ___________, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, Kluwer, Boston, 1988. 

[3] Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, Digireads.com. 2015.

[4] Poincaré, Henri, Dernières Pensées, Flammarion. 1920.

[5] Rothbard, Murray, “Beyond Is and Ought,” Liberty (November, 1988).